Search and replace a line in a file in Python

Question

I want to loop over the contents of a text file and do a search and replace on some lines and write the result back to the file. I could first load the whole file in memory

Answer 1

This should work: (inplace editing)

import fileinput

# Does a list of files, and
# redirects STDOUT to the file in question
for line in fileinput.input(files, inplace = 1): 
      print line.replace("foo", "bar"),